1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to integrated circuits (ICs) and more particularly to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) of ICs.
2. Description of Related Art
Today's deep sub-micron process present ever-increasing challenges to engineers working on full custom analog and digital designs for ICs. As the process node feature sizes become smaller, the number and complexity of the design constraints (also known as design rules and process constraints) increase. With this increased complexity, the need for assistance and/or automation to aid the engineer becomes more and more essential.
EDA companies are rapidly adopting OpenAccess (OA), which is a community-driven initiative that provides an interoperability platform for complex IC design based on a common, open, and extensible architecture. OA provides an open standard application programming interface (API) and reference database implementation supporting that API.
Design constraints are defined in the technology database (techDB), and can later be overridden in OA-supporting EDA tools. Common use of overrides is specifying a different set of design constraints on a per object basis, such as specifying allowable layers and widths for a particular net. In this context EDA tools and applications must provide a friendly interface to allow the user to create a local override on a given object (such as a net). Presenting the user with all the existing design constraints is prohibitively complicated and confusing—OA has over 100 different design constraints, and in addition allows applications to define their own.
However, conventional EDA applications and systems do not allow users to access relevant constraint information in a flexible way (e.g., for pruning the design constraints so that the user's interface is not cluttered by irrelevant constraints). Thus, there is a need for a registry for EDA applications that allows users to access constraint information in the process of IC design.